No, That Democrat Didn’t Vote ‘100% of the Time’ With Nancy Pelosi

It’s a phrase you’re hearing a lot in debates and Republican attack ads: that Democrat X voted “100 percent of the time” with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Whenever you hear a claim like that, be skeptical. It’s probably false.

Some of these ads go even further. An ad for J.D. Vance in Ohio, for instance, claims his Senate opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “votes with Biden, Pelosi 100 percent.” He repeated that statistic in a news release today.

Ryan actually ran against Pelosi for House speaker in 2016, winning 63 votes. In 2018, he signed a letter calling for her ouster. He’s probably been her most vocal critic among elected Democrats, at some risk to his career in the House.

Republicans have tried the same tactic against other Democratic rebels — notably Representative Abigail Spanberger, a lawmaker from Northern Virginia who is another of Pelosi’s in-house critics. “Abigail Spanberger votes 100 percent with Pelosi,” one G.O.P. ad says. “It is like having our very own Pelosi mini-me.”

Pelosi has been a boogeywoman in Republican campaigns for more than a decade. Remember “Fire Pelosi” in 2010? The haircut thing during the pandemic? The ice cream freezer drawer? For G.O.P. operatives, linking vulnerable Democrats to Pelosi, or the “radical San Francisco liberal” in their words, is akin to a classic rock station that always plays “Stairway to Heaven” or “Free Bird” — they do it because they think it works.

And has Ryan voted with Pelosi and Biden 100 percent of the time? Has Spanberger? Not really. Republicans have leveled the same cookie-cutter accusation at Cindy Axne, Angie Craig, Elaine Luria, Chris Pappas, Dean Phillips and Susan Wild — all of them known to be among the least partisan Democrats in the House.

Let’s unpack where those statistics come from, and why they’re so misleading.

There are two main sources that track congressional voting records: FiveThirtyEight, which rates lawmakers on how often they align with Biden, and ProPublica, which built an online tool that allows you to compare head-to-head voting records of any two members of Congress.

ProPublica’s tool lists only “votes designated as major by ProPublica.” In the current Congress, there have been 123 such votes. And when you do a comparison between Pelosi and Ryan, it does return a result of 100 percent, along with the text: “They have disagreed on 0 votes out of 123 votes in the 117th Congress.”

But that’s “really misleading,” according to John Lawrence, a former chief of staff to Pelosi and the author of a new book on her first tenure as speaker, “Arc of Power.”

Not only, he said, does the tool cherry-pick votes, but it doesn’t capture how often Pelosi has had to deliver what Lawrence called “bad news” to the left wing of her caucus when the Senate balks. During the negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, for instance, Senator Joe Lieberman refused to support a public insurance option — so Pelosi had to twist the arms of disappointed progressives in the House to get them to support final passage.

Here are six more reasons that the 100 percent thing is bunk:

First: Because she’s speaker, by House tradition, Pelosi usually doesn’t vote. So on a purely factual basis, it’s flat wrong.

“We could estimate with some confidence, but it’s not a great metric,” said Sarah Binder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University who studies Congress. But that’s a minor point.

Second: Centrists like Ryan will sponsor or co-sign reams of legislation that never gets a vote because it doesn’t match the priorities of their more liberal Democratic colleagues. Along with Spanberger, for instance, he’s a co-sponsor of the Trust in Congress Act, a bill to bar lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks. Pelosi initially opposed it. Ryan also broke with Pelosi by opposing the USA Freedom Act of 2014, which would have cut off the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone records.

Third: The “100 percent” sound bites also don’t capture all the times Ryan, for one, voted with the man who hopes to replace Pelosi as speaker: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. ProPublica’s tool finds that, in the 116th Congress, Ryan and McCarthy voted together 256 times out of 744 total votes, including 11 “major votes.”

Drew Hammill, a deputy chief of staff in Pelosi’s office, also noted that legislation on gun safety, infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing had passed with Republican votes.

Fourth: Like a duck paddling beneath the surface of the water, there’s a lot that goes on in Congress that is not easy to see and is impossible to quantify: Lawmakers shape legislation through committee meetings, private exchanges or random hallway encounters with colleagues, public statements and amendments.

As Lawrence pointed out, lawmakers will often withhold their vote in exchange for concessions that make a bill more palatable for their districts. Ryan, for instance, insisted on beefing up pro-union provisions in the CHIPS Act, the bipartisan semiconductor bill, and he got his way before voting yes.

If you’re a Capitol Hill reporter or a whiz at using Congress.gov, the government’s extremely clunky vote-tracking tool, or the even more arcane Congressional Record, you can trace some of that. But a lot of the give-and-take is hard to capture with data.

Fifth: Lawmakers on the left are just as likely to break with leadership as centrists are, if not more so. By ProPublica’s measure, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York voted with Pelosi 94 percent of the time — but nobody would describe her as more moderate than Ryan or Spanberger. Binder noted that, on paper, Ocasio-Cortez often votes with Republicans when she opposes the Democrats’ party line. So she shows up as a “moderate” in some indexes, as do Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

Sixth: The House and the Senate are different institutions, with different structures and traditions. The House, for instance, has a much more powerful Rules Committee, which enforces more party-line voting. As Binder pointed out, most votes are “procedural votes” that don’t tell us much about a lawmaker’s ideological predilections.

In the Senate, where any senator can hold up a bill for pretty much any reason, there’s also the filibuster — which, for better or worse, promotes more collaboration across the aisle.

So if you run two senators against one another in ProPublica’s app, you’ll find far more Democrats voting with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at rates in the 80s. But that doesn’t tell you all that much about whether, say, Senator Jon Tester of Montana is to the left of Representative Jared Golden of Maine. And the Senate tends to vote on lots of nominations, which clogs up the data.

So which metrics are more accurate?

Political scientists prefer more sophisticated measures of ideology, but they don’t tend to be easy to use. There are two main ones: VoteView, which I wrote about earlier, and Congressional Quarterly’s “Party Unity” score.

Party Unity scores are proprietary, but C.Q. occasionally releases rankings to the public. The publication’s list of the Democrats who voted most often against their own party’s majority makes intuitive sense. The top 10 of these “opposition Democrats” in 2020 all represented swing districts: They include Golden, Spanberger, Luria of Virginia, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Max Rose of New York, Joe Cunningham of North Carolina, Anthony Brindisi of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida.

By VoteView’s more complex measure, Ryan scores a -0.402, which puts him around the middle of the Democratic pack. Spanberger scores a -0.176, implying that she is more conservative.

For comparison’s sake, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, scores a -0.681, while Golden, the most conservative Democrat, is at -0.114. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who voted with Pelosi 99 percent of the time according to ProPublica’s online tool, is right up there with Golden at -0.15.

But that’s not exactly the stuff attack ads are made of, let alone rebuttals. You probably won’t see Ryan out there promoting his VoteView rating of -0.402 on the hustings — it’s far easier for him to say, as he often does, “Well, I ran against Nancy Pelosi.”

What to read

• Many American entrepreneurs have mixed politics and business. No one has fused the two quite like the election-denying chief executive of MyPillow, report Alexandra Berzon, Charles Homans and Ken Bensinger.

• As was the case in 2020, Republican votes are more likely to be counted and reported first in several battleground states, giving the party’s candidates deceptively large early leads. Nick Corasaniti reports on the “red mirage.”

• As Cheri Beasley and Val Demings run competitive Senate campaigns in North Carolina and Florida, some Black female Democrats say party leaders are leaving them to fend for themselves, writes Jonathan Weisman.

• A Tennessee man was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for dragging a police officer protecting the Capitol into an angry pro-Trump crowd that brutally assaulted the officer on Jan. 6, 2021. Alan Feuer has sentencing details.

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